User blog:RpBowman/Alternate Rules Ideas
I have no idea what I'm doing here, so I apologize if I'm stepping on anyone's toes. This wiki stuff is something I have to feel my way around. So, there are several things I'd like to talk about as far as alternate rules for Unknown Armies goes: 1. In the time since UA first came out, some rather nifty ideas about roleplaying have come down the pipe. Among them are new ways of player reward, increased power for players over settings and a few really cool ways of handling conflict that let players feel really cool, but still give the storyline the licks it needs to add tension. Unknown Armies has some great ideas in its makeup as well. Psychologically speaking, it's well modeled, allowing players to progress through the stages of mental trauma which is where the supernatural is most keenly felt. But, as I think this wiki demonstrates, relativism has begun to creep into game design. I think that's a good thing. Roleplaying sessions tend to be intimate, intellectual and flexible, a kind of micro-culture that reshapes itself to fit the players in attendance. I think rules should play to those strengths. Unknown Armies was originally written on the classical model of a Roleplaying Game, a form it has taken for over 20 years, with a solid setting that only a GM could tweak. Well, why not boil out some of the keen ideas from the setting and allow both players and GM to tweak them? For me, the keen ideas in the original setting were: 1. The Occult World is made up of a bunch of tiny little conspiracies, nothing big, nothing international. 2. There's a few groups everyone has heard about. A group of enforcers, a group of crusaders and a group of idiots. Each player cabal has their own opinions on who those are and may be wrong, when push comes to shove. 3. The player cabal is usually involved in some kerfuffle when they catch wind of a potential shift in the status quo of the Occult Underground (or whatever you want to call the clued-in community.) 4. Magic spells require a few basic conditions to work. - You have to draw magic into a vessel (yourself), you have to use the vessel for a ritual action of some kind, the ritual action and the vessel must both have some symbolic significance to the person enacting the magic, you have to observe a taboo (between "charing up the vessel" and performing the ritual actions of the spell) lest the magic in the vessel drain away. That's a pretty good semiotic workup of how people think magic works, or at least, have always thought magic works. 5. T. Joe Walters (and other characters everyone should know and regret.) 6. A sense that you always have to give something up to get any kind of power. 7. The Fear/Rage/Noble/Obsession bonuses and Hardened/Failed notches (although I would dearly like to simplify this!) Any comments? Category:Blog posts